


Ten Feet Under

by QuenchiestCactusJuice99



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Konoha doesn’t care much about Sasuke’s state of mind, Self-Blame, Uchiha Massacre, Uchiha Sasuke-centric, but that doesn’t excuse never doing anything about it, except Sasuke’s really bad at it, mostly because over a hundred people have just been massacred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 21:42:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21483289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuenchiestCactusJuice99/pseuds/QuenchiestCactusJuice99
Summary: Sasuke’s feelings (or lack thereof) in the aftermath of the massacre.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	Ten Feet Under

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve had this written for a while, but I’m going through my old writing and deciding if I should post any of it, so here you are. Yes it’s angst, but is anyone surprised? I figure when an entire clan is murdered in one night, people care more about finding out how it was done and why than the mental health of a survivor.

His clan is dead, by his brother’s own hand. Uchiha Sasuke is left to his own devices in the stained house where he watched his parents’ murders and the empty compound that his older brother tortured him in.

They take him away first though. He wakes up disoriented and surrounded by people he doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember their faces and they don’t tell him their names. And they ask him questions, the same questions, over and over and over again. They ask him why his brother would do such a thing, why was such a deed done, for what reason, why, why,  _ why? _

They ask him the same questions again and again until he starts to wish for any sort of deviance from it, until he weeps and screams and bites at anyone who comes near.

They muzzle him and ask the questions again, unsatisfied with his answers, displeased with his lack of knowledge, and they tell him that he must know  _ something. _

They tell him this so often he begins to believe it.  _ Why did you let that happen?  _ His mind accuses him,  _ why didn’t you tell someone? You must have known something, must have noticed something, you must have seen the signs! Why didn’t you do anything? _

Why, why,  _ why? _

When he is finally returned to the compound, there are no bodies on the ground or in the houses and shops anymore. Broken windows, wrecked tatami, torn paper screens have been replaced. 

When he is finally returned to the compound, desolate and blank and bare of emotion and feeling, there are no bodies to keep him company. They have all been buried. 

Buried, and not returned to the flames at a pyre as all Uchiha should be. They have been buried deep in soil, where fire suffocates and is quenched and cannot burn away the impurities of the flesh as is necessary to allow their souls safe passage to the pure lands.

(The compound is empty of bodies but not of the dead and neither of stains.)

(He covers the two marks on the floor with a carpet and avoids it steadfastly.)

Slowly, he begins to feel again. His grief and sorrow and devastation thaw, each at their own rate, and as he claws his way out of numbness he finds the stirrings of loathing and animosity and disgust in his chest.

_ Why did you let him do that? _

He cleans. He spends hours washing down every inch of everything in the house, hands shaking and knuckles raw as he scrubs at the persistent stains on the floor. Eventually, he admits defeat to the house so stubbornly clinging to his parents and puts the carpet back over the reminders of what happened that night.

_ You’ll come back to it later, _ he tells himself.

(He never so much as sets a single toe on that carpet again.)

He doesn’t eat. He isn’t hungry. He avoids mirrors. He doesn’t want to see  _ that man’s _ face ever again.

_ Why did you let him kill them? _

Sasuke wallows, sinking into his grief and emptiness, and knows intimately what it means to drown on dry land. His father would scoff. An Uchiha of fire and flame, drowning?

Unforgivable.

He doesn’t even know where his clan was buried.

He is stolen away again, by shadows of his own creation, but he doesn’t mind. He is taken by nonexistent shadows but they do not ask him questions and they do not bind him up.

He is bleak and vacant and he can no longer even cry. He feels emptier than his compound, thinks he feels like an unwelcome stranger inside his own home before laughing at the thought.

He laughs and laughs and laughs, rusty and disused, voice cutting out in places. He laughs like a thousand wind chimes lying cracked and broken underfoot, ringing peals that sing fractured to the still trees witness to it.

His home is nowhere here. His home is his clan. His clan was  _ buried. _

(Sometimes, he thinks he was buried with them.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Go ahead and leave me a comment if you really liked something about this, I’d love to hear your opinion!
> 
> Also!! Come check out this cool Naruto server I’m in!! Genjutsu Support Group


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